It is incredibly easy to install WordPress, and get your website going. But it is important to follow a few steps before driving traffic to your website.
Change Your Site Name and Information
Go to Settings > General
From this page, you can edit general global settings about your website including:
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- Site Name
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- Tagline
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- Email Address (used for notification purposes)
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- Date/Time Formats
Make your URLS Pretty
Go to Settings > Permalinks
From this page, you can change your permalink structure to prevent WordPress URLS from having site.com?p=23. Using %postname% somewhere in your permalinks is great for SEO. WordPress will use the title of your page in the URL structure. If you look at this page, the title is “Guide to Setting up your WordPress Website”, the URL contains “guide-to-setting-up-your-wordpress-website”
Setup a Text Page as the Home Page instead of Blog Posts
First you need to create your home page, and the text you want to display on it. If your theme has a special home page template, be sure to select that template in the page edit screen under “Page Attributes”. You will also need to create a blog page that has no text, and select a blog template if your theme requires.
Go to Settings > Reading
Under “Front page displays” select “A static page” instead of “Your latest posts”, then for front page, choose the page you want to use. Also, select the blog page you want to use for posts page. In this settings page, you can also modify how many blog items will display on the blog page, and any archive pages (category and tag pages).
Enable Search Engines to find Your Website
When your site is 100% ready to be visible to the world, go to Settings > Privacy and select the option “Allow search engines to index this site”.
If you are interested in learning more about WordPress, be sure to join us for our Advanced WordPress Workshop on May 18. If you have any questions, leave a comment below or email me at alyssa@infotrustllc.com!
